by S. T. Joshi
But in order for that experience to happen he had to get to the designated birth place. What would happen if he wasn’t there when the baby alien was ready to come out was not in his power to know, but it wouldn’t be good. When he pressed the buzzer attached to the chair arm, he didn’t feel or hear anything, and nobody came. The hollow in the deep middle of his body was stretching and tearing. He called out, a phlegmy roar. There was no sign of anyone to help him, and he couldn’t wait.
He managed to slide himself out of the chair onto the floor. Pain radiated through the body parts that were still there and those that weren’t. He hoped he hadn’t hurt the baby. He was maneuvering toward the door between the bedroom and bathroom with the phone in his shirt pocket and the stylus in his teeth when somebody crooned, “Hello, Nolan.”
Who was that? Usually the service at least gave him a heads-up about a new attendant. The sound he made came out a squeal.
“Nice to finally meet you in person.”
Since Nolan’s body wouldn’t twist or turn or lean very much, his field of vision was limited, and this idiot was outside it. They were supposed to get training about stuff like that. They were supposed to announce their presence, not sneak up on him, and they were supposed to stay where he could see them, and tell their names, or some name for him to call them by. He didn’t care about the name thing; they were all just Goonette or Goon. This voice could be male or female or trans. Not that it mattered; Nolan barely thought of himself as one gender or another, let alone anybody else.
Goonette said, over-the-top friendly, “How can I help you, Nolan?” and loomed somewhere over him in a cloud of strange body heat and odor, and growled “Ah” as if thick pleasure had been brought up in her/his throat.
“Tub.”
He was working up to saying more words, to increase the minimal chances of being understood, when Goonette spoke for him. Nolan hated when people did that because they were almost always wrong. But Goonette said, “You want to get back in the tub so the baby can be born.”
Bunched up on the floor, he nodded. Everything inside him was very still, except for the familiar alien movements of the baby.
Goonette’s long strong arms embraced Nolan from behind, something like a heart beating into Nolan’s back, chin-like protrusion pressing into the top of Nolan’s head. The hands felt up Nolan’s thighs and crotch before one of them got to the phone and pulled it out of the pocket. His motions and noises of protest might have been made in the silence of outer space for all the effect they had.
Balancing him in what felt like several arms, Goonette used several appendages to strip him. Also to caress him: “You like that, Nolan? That feel good?” Then he was not exactly carried but transported and deposited in the bathtub, leg and stump arranged. The pain was slicing and gouging now, not in any one place but from all angles.
What must be Goonette was hovering over him. He couldn’t make out much detail except the light of his phone camera and a long pliant glean that rushed toward his crotch and into it, digging and tearing. Pleasure and agony peaked and something enormous broke out of him, making an alien noise.
“Good one,” he heard Goonette chortle. “Better than any of the rest. They’ll love this at home. Nolan, we will make you a star.”
Contact
JOHN PELAN AND STEPHEN MARK RAINEY
Author, editor, and publisher John Pelan works as an editor for Centipede Press and Ramble House Publishers. While he will protest that he isn’t really a Mythos writer, the lure of Cthulhu and kin seems to draw him back on regular occasions. John and his wife Kathy retired to Gallup, New Mexico, after decades of living in the Pacific Northwest.
Stephen Mark Rainey is the author of the novels Dreams of the Dark (with Elizabeth Massie; HarperEntertainment, 1999), Balak (Wildside Press, 2000), The Lebo Coven (Five Star, 2004), The Nightmare Frontier (Sarob Press, 2006), Blue Devil Island (Five Star, 2007), and The Monarchs (Crossroad Press, 2013), more than 90 published works of short fiction, five short story collections, and several audio dramas for Big Finish Productions based on the Dark Shadows TV series. For ten years, he edited the award-winning magazine Deathrealm and has edited anthologies for Chaosium, Arkham House, and Delirium Books. Mark lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.
AT FIRST I DID NOT WANT TO GO. THE PAY WAS ALL one could hope for, but the long trip in stasis, where one is at the mercy of any mechanical failure, was itself enough to dissuade most people. Who could forget the return of the Mehitobel and her cargo of corpses? The ship had done its job, of course; the fact that the life-support units had burned out, leaving sixty people to die in stasis and quietly rot, was not the fault of the navigational program. The ship had reached Pluto and patiently waited for the crew to finish excavating a load of eganinium and return to Earth. But the crew had never broached the frozen surface or even left the ship. They had died before mining a single ounce of that most precious element.
However, money speaks volumes when one’s investments have fallen short of expectations, so I went. And the journey to that icy rock some five billion miles distant was successful—inasmuch as our life-support units operated flawlessly for the duration. However, we went with a crew barely half the size of the former ship’s. “Budgetary concerns” the official explanation given, though the real reason was simple gunshyness, and everyone knew it. I served as the expedition’s chief geologist, my primary duty being to oversee the extraction of eganinium from Pluto’s subsurface deposit; a serious responsibility to be sure, but one with which I felt reasonably comfortable, despite having a smaller workforce, a tighter schedule, and a slimmer budget than any previous expedition. The Murata Corporation needed to compensate for the Mehitobel’s failure, simple as that, and time was of the essence. Pluto’s orbit was carrying it toward the sun, and within the next two years the surface of solid nitrogen would sublimate, resulting in a dense, turbulent atmosphere that would preclude mining for nearly a century.
Thirteen months in stasis feels like the hard sleep after the bachelor party to end all bachelor parties. Coming out of it, I knew the Akhenaten’s life-support units were functioning perfectly because my limbs felt as if scorpions had built nests in them, and I would have sworn that someone had stuffed a rasp down my throat. Fortunately, the revival system IVs flushed away these horrid aftereffects in a matter of minutes, and once I felt more or less capable, I pulled myself out of my crypt and onto the gravideck. My legs were wobbly but able to support my body, which weighed about point-seven Earth norm inside the rotating fuselage, and thanks to the revival batteries my heart and lungs adjusted readily to the change in my physical state. Around me, I could hear the sounds of the ship gradually coming to life: a few coughs, a grumble here and there, the thump-clump-patter of unsteady footsteps. Then an unmistakable baritone growled, “There be some sorry life here,” which told me to expect the whip to crack before we could even wash the sleep from our eyes.
The first thing I did was collect my dataclip—my hot link to the ship’s brain—from the drawer next to my stasis bay so I could prepare for the upcoming briefing. Then I started for Audit One, taking cautious, deliberate steps, ignoring the tremors in my months-empty stomach, knowing it would be some hours before I could tolerate solid food. Long before the faintest spark of awareness had intruded on my enforced oblivion, the revival system had begun prepping my body for normal functioning, but one didn’t spring up from a thirteen-month nap and hit the ground running.
Unless you were Captain Samuel “Red” Tupper, who apparently put no stock in rumors of post-hibernation lethargy. I knew he was behind me when the gangway began to shudder rhythmically, and a heavy hand came down on my shoulder, squeezing it as if my bones were malleable things to be shaped to suit his whim.
“Morning, Mr. Sykes,” he said, his voice a bellow even at conversational level. “I’ll expect the LDI analysis from you within half an hour. I need coordinates for dropping the E-drills, and I want you on the surface as soon as they’re down.”
“Roger, Skipper,” I muttered, though the huge, red-bearded figure moved past me so quickly I doubt he even heard. No moss ever gathered beneath those clodhoppers.
Audit One was the main briefing room, the site of the post-hibernation party for non-ship systems personnel. Here Tarec, our computer, would fill us in on any mission-related data that might have changed during our voyage. We would catch up on any news from home, personal or otherwise, only at the end of company business.
I saw a slim figure standing at the briefing hall entrance, and I barely recognized her until her husky voice said, “Hello, sailor,” and her turquoise eyes brightened as she smiled. Her sandy hair had grown six inches since our departure from Earth.
“Kathryn,” I said with a nod of greeting. “Glad to see we’ve woken up alive.”
“Just in time to make some money for Uncle Takashi.”
Kathryn Rhodes had been my number one for four years, with two missions to Titan under her belt. I expected this to be her last as an assistant, for she was overdue for a slot as chief geo. I know it was selfish of me, but when that time came I almost wished she would decline the promotion. Not entirely for professional reasons.
Audit One was a large chamber containing several rows of seats, some of which were already occupied; a bank of holo and vidpanels suspended from the ceiling; and a massive, circular port in the curved floor through which we could see a field of fiery stars slowly gliding past. The panels displayed various images of Pluto and Charon as viewed by our forward-mounted scanners, so crystal-clear that the electronic screens might as well have been portals into the void.
Even in the chamber, which hummed with life, seeing the distant stars and those dark, desolate planetoids filled me with an aching loneliness, a sense that I truly stood at the edge of the universe. An insignificant gnat that had flown too far from home and gotten lost in the vastness of space.
I took a quick count and found that most of my geo crew had already arrived, and the rest were just filing in. Tarec could just as easily handle the briefing, but tradition called for the chief geo to present it “live,” so to speak, so I slipped my dataclip behind my ear and started the transfer of the main mission file. As clear as my own thoughts, the details of our operation unfolded in my head, the updated matrix automatically comparing itself to the original I had loaded prior to launch. The transfer agent would stop to query me only in the event of a major deviation between the files.
Which is exactly what it did, just as I was about to take my place at the lectern that hovered above the circular viewport. I paused, looked around, and saw that Kathryn had also stopped in her tracks, one hand on her dataclip, her face a bemused question mark.
Even as our eyes simultaneously registered bafflement, over the PA system disembodied voices began querying others, some calling for verification of deviant data, others issuing orders to Tarec, one requesting the captain’s presence at Navcom.
According to the data I was receiving, Tarec should have brought the ship systems crew out of stasis ten weeks earlier. Circumstances had dictated human intervention, yet the Akhenaten had sailed blithely on and, contrary to alert protocol, entered its pre-programmed orbital groove two hundred miles above Pluto.
“There’s something at Point Echo Gamma One,” Kathryn said, and we both turned to look at the holopanels above us—which would be bringing our final orbital station into view within the next few minutes. “Quite a few somethings, if the analyzer is correct.”
I nodded, my dataclip having confirmed the information. “There should be nothing and no one out here,” I said. “No one authorized, that is.”
Kathryn held up a hand as she picked up a new transfer from her dataclip. “I’m getting some details from the communications log. Jesus, no transmissions received since dash-five-nine. And no confirmations of any of our outgoing. That right there should have triggered Alert One.”
“Diagnostics indicate shipboard systems nominal. No preempts of any autofunctions. All routine transmissions logged as completed.” I gazed curiously at the stars beyond the viewport. “It’s as if they were … swallowed … somewhere out there.”
“And the ship simply ignored alert procedure.”
We stiffened as the dire realization fell upon us simultaneously.
“Something’s wrong with Tarec,” Kathryn finally said.
Neither of us spoke as Mehitobel’s ghost paid a chilling call, prompting us to wonder how close we might have come to following its crew into oblivion. Who knew if, prior to the failure of its life-support systems, that ship had experienced similar anomalies? Was there something out here that played havoc with shipboard systems?
“Geo execs to Navcom,” Captain Tupper’s voice called. “Make haste.”
Without a word, Kathryn and I headed for the ship’s nerve center at the forward end of the fuselage. There we found the command crew staring fixedly at the bank of holopanels that dominated the chamber, the captain and Deena Ellis, his XO, as spellbound as the rest. In the amber light that saturated the room, Captain Tupper’s eyes looked redder than his hair.
“What do you suppose we’re seeing here, Mr. Sykes?”
I thought it was a great, gaping crater, perhaps the caldera of some immense volcano, from which spidery cracks radiated in every direction, as if a huge fist had hurtled out of deep space to gouge a hole the planet’s frozen surface.
At least, that was the view on panel one. Panel two, however, which focused on the same sector but from an oblique angle, told a completely different story.
Here, to my shock, the vast black area appeared to be the inverse of the original image: a towering, conical monolith whose crown rose countless miles above the surface, its surfaces gleaming onyx laced with veins of red that blazed angrily against the backdrop of space. Its spidery arms were not cracks in the planet’s crust, but an endless number of long, branchlike appendages that groped their way to outer space as if seeking the sun, billions of miles distant.
The incredible disparity between the images made me feel queasy. I had to put a hand on the nav console to steady myself.
Tera Keller, at the helm, called out, “Coming up on orbital point Alpha, T-minus thirty seconds, mark.”
“We’re not breaking orbit?” Kathryn asked.
Tupper shook his head. “Can’t plot a new course yet. Tarec seems to be … confused … by conflicting data. We’re working on it manually, just in case. But we’re already in the groove to go on station. We try to pull out now, we’re liable to careen right into Charon.” He half chuckled.
The way he’d said that Tarec was “confused” rekindled my nausea, but there was nothing to do but plod onward and rely on our training for coping with unforeseen situations. Keller began his countdown from ten, at the end of which I felt a very subtle shift beneath my feet as the retros kicked in and the Akhenaten parked herself at Point Alpha, two hundred miles above the eganinium deposit that had drawn us here.
“On station,” Keller said. She glanced at the captain. “Shall I keep the boilers hot?”
“Hell yes, keep ’em hot,” Tupper said. He stepped over to Masao Kochi, our sci exec, who was entering data into his workstation with frenzied fingers. “Anything on those contacts we picked up in the area?”
“Nothing conclusive,” Kochi said. His uncle was one of Murata Corp’s most fiscally conservative administrators, who got along with our skipper not at all; thus, Tupper frequently came down hard on the young man, just on principle. Tupper scowled at him, but Kochi ignored it. “I’ve picked up over a hundred individual marks, but I can’t get a reading on them. Whether they’re organic, mechanical, or otherwise … I can’t say.”
“Then lock number three cam on one of them and eyeball the damn thing.”
Kochi shook his head in exasperation. “Trying to, sir. Tarec’s not holding vis coordinates long enough for me to get a lock.”
“Just like the nav systems,” Deena Ellis said. “Tarec knows something is wrong but not
what or why. And it’s not flagging a single anomaly.”
“We’re lucky we made it out of bed, aren’t we?” Kathryn said to me softly.
“Something tells me that if Mehitobel’s crew had woken up, they would have found exactly this.”
“At least that ship made it back intact,” she said, obviously grasping for anything even remotely hopeful.
I rarely worked in Navcom, but there was a geoscanning station there with my name on it, so I settled into the seat, logged in, and brought up a chart of Point Echo Gamma One, the site of the eganinium deposit. It was a rough oblong, about ninety miles by forty miles at its widest point, just north of Pluto’s equator, on the hemisphere that perpetually faced Charon. The scanners confirmed the presence of eganinium, a peculiar, unstable element of which one metric ton could power a megalopolis for a decade or propel a spaceship to the end of the solar system in just over a year. It was the most hazardous and most prized substance ever discovered, and as far as anyone knew, it existed only on Pluto.
Currently, however, something was happening on the surface. Tarec confirmed the presence of moving objects but could not identify them. Whatever the incredible formation was that we saw rising from the surface—or deeply penetrating it, depending on one’s vantage point—our ship’s brain acknowledged its existence but could neither measure it nor ascertain its physical properties. Our scanners had detected the first signs of it ten weeks earlier, yet Tarec had failed to revive the executive crew. The latter point disturbed me more than the irregularity itself.
As I focused the viewer on the icy plain below, I would have sworn I was looking at a vast protuberance hovering above the surface, shaped like a forked tree branch, its onyx “skin” laced with veins of red—almost resembling striated muscle, I thought. But as my eyes followed its contours, I realized they were tracking the edges of a huge crevasse, and the red veins were glowing filaments that wound their way deep into the bowels of the frozen planet. Even on the panel, the shifting image made my head swim, and I had to back away for a moment to fend off another attack of nausea. I never could have imagined an optical illusion so intense, so disorienting; an illusion that toyed not only with human eyes but also with the most sophisticated artificial brain ever developed.
